David Moore as Petruchio and Tonia Usher as Kate spar in the African-American Shakespeare Company performance of "Taming of the Shrew," one of the Free Night offerings. Photo by Marty Sohl

David Moore as Petruchio and Tonia Usher as Kate spar in the African-American Shakespeare Company performance of "Taming of the Shrew," one of the Free Night offerings. Photo by Marty Sohl

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Thrillpeddlers presents "Shocktober-fest!! 2006: Laboratory of Hallucinations" at the Hypnodrome. Photo by David Allen

Thrillpeddlers presents "Shocktober-fest!! 2006: Laboratory of Hallucinations" at the Hypnodrome. Photo by David Allen

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A Second Bow for Free Night of Theater

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Give someone a theater ticket and you open up a whole new world of cultural possibilities.

That's the thinking behind Free Night of Theater, launched last year in San Francisco by Theatre Bay Area and returning all over the Bay Area on Thursday. TBA asked local theaters to donate the unsubscribed portion of the house, or at least 25 percent of the seats, for one night on or around Oct. 19.

Theatre Communications Group Executive Director Ben Cameron conceived the idea at the group's 2003 conference in Milwaukee and tried it out in three cities in October 2005. Theatre Bay Area, the largest of the country's regional theater service organizations, spearheaded the effort here, and sister organizations instigated it in Austin, Texas and Philadelphia.

"The original idea was that we'd have the whole night be free and just open up the house, which was a lot to ask," says TBA Executive Director Brad Erickson. "It was actually Ed Decker at New Conservatory who said, 'If none of them are my regular patrons, the people coming aren't going to get a very good sense of what New Conservatory is all about.' I mean, if you went to New Conservatory's Pride Season and there wasn't anybody gay in the audience, it wouldn't be a very real telling of what that experience is like." Sherri Young says she appreciated the publicity boost and repeat business her African-American Shakespeare Company, whose "Taming of the Shrew" is among this year's offerings, got out of last year's Free Night.

"Our audience is mostly minority based, African American, and a lot of schools, but this audience was true theater buffs, and there was more diversity in the audience," she says. "We had more Asians and Latinos coming to our show last year. And they have to go into the Western Addition. We had a lot of older people coming that probably weren't used to going into that neighborhood."

Russell Blackwood of Thrillpeddlers says he wasn't necessarily able to spot the newbies last year, but at least he knew for sure they were there.

"Definitely there were takers," he says, "and they took the free ticket seriously and showed up at the theater, which you can't always say of theater people getting comps."

Overall about 1 in 5 takers were no-shows, which isn't unusual for giveaways.

"You get the ticket and then it just slips your mind," says Melissa Hillman, artistic director of Impact Theatre, whose comedy "Colorado" is in the mix this year. "This time it's happening so late in our run that it's a night we probably would have sold out. But the potential gains are less the point for us than participating in this national event that creates awareness and public value for theater nationally."

Research by Mark Shugoll & Associates found that among the 7,500 tickets given away in the Bay Area last year, 81 percent attended a theater they'd never been to before, and a quarter of those new attendees wound up returning to that same theater as paying customers in the subsequent nine months. Overall, 35 percent said they were attending plays more often since the Free Night of Theater.

"Shugoll does this kind of research across the country, and he said he'd never seen an audience development initiative with that kind of results," Erickson says.

This year Theatre Communications Group is expanding the program to Atlanta; Boston; Cleveland; Lexington, Ky.; Los Angeles; Sacramento; Seattle; and Washington, D.C., and statewide in Oregon, New Jersey, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Connecticut. Next year it hopes to add New York and Chicago.

"We felt like we're still in tryouts with this program," Erickson says. "When we open this in New York, it's like a theater review. It's either going to be thumbs up or thumbs down, and we need it to be thumbs up. So we've got to really make sure that we know that we have this program down by the time we roll it out in New York."

The list of local participants includes everybody from TheatreWorks and Berkeley Rep to Ray of Light and Three Wise Monkeys.

Because not everyone has a show playing this Thursday, some companies are offering their free night on a different night. Erickson himself has a play he wrote on offer, "The War at Home" at New Conservatory. A few companies, such as 42nd Street Moon, have multiple performances up for grabs. American Conservatory Theater went all out, offering three nights at the end of the run of Tom Stoppard's "Travesties," all five previews of Lillian Hellman's "The Little Foxes" and three shows apiece of the ACT master's of fine arts program performances of "Red Scare on Sunset" and "Baby With the Bathwater."

Tickets became available Oct. 3 after a kickoff event at the Tix booth in Union Square, and by the next morning there were only seven shows with tickets still available out of 95 performances by 74 Bay Area theaters. In Sacramento, there were dozen shows left out of 40 on offer from 26 companies, which were also being given away through TBA's Web site. (Last year TBA had a similar experience, in which the tickets were snatched up within a week, and it went on to solicit a second wave of tickets, so those numbers are likely to have changed.)

Erickson says it's "really gratifying" this year that not one theater said "no" out of a lack of interest. "There are a couple of them that just didn't have a show during the right period of time."

Ultimately the point is to increase awareness not so much of Free Night of Theater but instead of theater itself.

"If we do this over a period of say, five years, can we track an increase in theatergoing generally in the Bay Area over that time, and can we track an increase in awareness of theater as an option?" Erickson says. "Because that's ultimately where we want to go, to increase cultural participation. That's the big picture behind it."